Documentation Is Critical To Success

Ever since companies started writing computer programs the developers have complained about Documentation. The production of documentation has been seen as boring and tedious and the developers fail to understand its value.

Now, when trying to move from the old, undocumented legacy application we get situations such as the TSB failure in the UK. No one yet knows what the cause of the issues has been but we do know that the project was aimed at moving from an old legacy application to a new environment. We don’t know how good the documentation about the legacy application was. But, we do know from experience that when carrying out legacy modernization projects poor documentation increases the chance of failure by 70%.

The main effect of poor documentation is reduced efficiencies and slow-down in the adoption of new methodologies and technologies, ultimately leading to increased costs and missed business opportunities.

So, apart from the dislike, all developers have for producing documentation what is the primary problem with keeping software documentation current?

Application life-cycles can be 20 to 30 years or longer, and during this time, there are too many changes and fixes made to keep the original documentation updated manually. The longer an application has been in existence the further from the truth the documentation really is.

Therefore, when an organization tries to do a legacy modernization project they are starting from a position of weakness and failure is the most likely outcome.

Intellisys automates the generation of documentation and its simple process means that even after a system has been updated the documentation can be quickly and easily updated.